The Death of Congestion Pricing

Urbanism takes it on the chin

Even by the standards of funhouse mirror New York, it was a strange and shocking morning: Kathy Hochul, the governor, was announcing she was single-handedly shutting down congestion pricing, just weeks away from the activation of the $15 tolls. “Let’s be real: A $15 charge may not seem like a lot to someone who has the means, but it can break the budget of a hard-working middle-class household,” she said in a video, not taking questions from the press. Transportation and environmental activists were livid, as well as many left-leaning Democrats in Albany. Outer borough and suburban moderates of both parties rejoiced. Hochul’s killing of congestion pricing—she called it an “indefinite pause”—was a special victory for Phil Murphy, the Democratic governor of New Jersey, who waged a furious, multi-year effort against the tolls, which would have charged motorists $15 during peak hours to enter below 60th street in Manhattan. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader and a Brooklyn power broker, is said to have leaned on Hochul to make the move, fearing Democrats running in marginal seats on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley were going to get bludgeoned by Republicans tying them to the unpopular new tolls.

And congestion pricing did not poll well. There were reasons to expect, over time, this would change—motorists would adjust, businesses would find they could still function, and the MTA could apply the new revenue to transportation upgrades. But now we will never find out. There is faint hope, for the transit and environmental left, that Hochul could revive congestion pricing after the November elections, and some question the legality of her decision. No matter what, there will no tolling cameras activated on June 30 and the $507 million the state paid out to a contractor to install the technology could end up completely wasted. More pressing, for the MTA, is the hole now blown in their capital budget. Congestion pricing was supposed to generate about $1 billion annually and factored heavily into projects and repairs the transportation authority was pursuing for the rest of the decade.

What do I think about this? I supported congestion pricing as a concept and even campaigned on it when I made my foray into politics in 2018. At the time, my hope was that Albany would implement a proposal known as Move NY, which called for tolls on the free East River bridges (Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, Queensboro) and reductions on the crossings that are already heavily tolled, like the Verrazzano between Brooklyn and Staten Island and the Whitestone, connecting Queens and the Bronx. This struck me as wise from a politics and policy perspective, accomplishing the goal of discouraging car traffic into Manhattan while earning crucial support from the outer boroughs and suburbs, where transit options are more limited. I still do not buy most of the doomsday arguments around congestion pricing. Numerous subway and commuter rail lines travel to downtown and Midtown Manhattan. Most people who work there, dine out there, and party there take public transportation. Getting cars off the road is important and street space, there, is precious: it should be tolled. Those who do drive into Manhattan are not particularly poor. They are coming from middle-class outer borough neighborhoods or the suburbs of New Jersey and Long Island. When they drive, they’ll probably spend upwards of $60 parking in the city, assuming they plan to hang out for a few hours. A $15 toll, in the context of a Broadway show and the price of a nearby parking garage, is really not that much money.

Congestion pricing failed, however, because there was never a compelling political argument made for it—the messaging was forever muddled, and Hochul plainly didn’t want to champion it. Covid, and the emptying out of Manhattan’s core in the early 2020s, didn’t help, either. Hochul became governor two years after her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, signed the tolling legislation into law. If Hochul did care about it at all, she could have made the argument that congestion pricing was needed to fund tangible outer borough transportation options. New York City does have transportation deserts and there are many people, in neighborhoods like Marine Park, Queens Village and Laurelton, who need cars to travel around the city. When New Yorkers heard about congestion pricing, they only thought of the stick—the punishment of the toll—and not the carrot. When I spoke with the MTA chairman, Janno Lieber, I told him this. New Yorkers want to know there will be new or better bus lines headed to their neighborhoods or even, someday, an expansion of the subway. In European and Asian countries, new subway and commuters lines are often added to existing systems. New York City’s subway map is frozen in time, virtually unchanged—absent the minor Q train extension on the Upper East Side and the additional 7 train stop to Hudson Yards—from the 1930s. Were New York like Tokyo, or the U.S. like Japan, there would be a subway down Utica Avenue to Sheepshead Bay, another train to Floyd Bennett Field, trains to eastern Queens and a subway that ran under the Hudson River to New Jersey. Since New York, and the rest of America, has grown so terribly sclerotic when it comes to building public infrastructure, it is impossible to dream of grander futures. A local might wonder why, exactly, the MTA is imposing a new toll. To do what with the cash? The MTA has wasted phenomenal sums of money. There is reason to believe, under Lieber, spending practices might improve. But a track record is a track record.

A second problem emerged: double-tolling. I wrote about this last August, and I was sensitive to it as a Bay Ridge resident who will, from time to time, pay the Hugh Carey tunnel toll between Brooklyn and Manhattan. It never made much sense the MTA was charging motorists who paid a tunnel toll to pay once again when coming into Manhattan. This was the source of much angst coming out of New Jersey, Brooklyn, and Queens. The MTA offered a slight discount, but was still planning to levy two tolls: one for crossing through already tolled tunnels and another for driving on Manhattan streets. It would have been better to stick to the Move NY concept of focusing on adding tolls to the free crossings. Paying money to drive through the Midtown Tunnel but getting a free ride on the Ed Koch-Queensboro Bridge never had any logic to it.

What’s most bizarre is that Hochul is apparently angling to replace the congestion pricing revenue with a new tax on New York City businesses alone. The suburbs will be spared, even if the MTA, which controls the commuter rails, serves them too. The business tax is widely unpopular and more alienating to Manhattan business owners than congestion pricing would have been. Hochul seems to have not thought this through and it’s grown apparent that she is not an especially gifted politician. She badly unperformed in the 2022 election, almost losing to Republican Lee Zeldin, and she has been desperate since to ensure this doesn’t happen again in 2026. She flails about, offering peculiar and alarmist messages to the public. Flooding the subway with National Guard troops logistically and politically made little sense. Crime in the subway has tailed off and there’s more than enough NYPD to handle it; sending troopers with machine guns underground is the sort of thing that terrifies tourists for no good reason. While Mayor Eric Adams has borne the brunt of the migrant crisis, failing for many months to adequately manage the influx, Hochul hasn’t always been of great help. There’s a growing sense of a profound power vacuum in New York, with Adams’ various scandals and Hochul’s fecklessness. A different sort of politician who inherently disliked congestion pricing as much as Hochul would have shut it down many months ago, long before money was wasted setting up the tolling technology. It doesn’t even appear Hochul ran her decision by the MTA board, which will have to vote on halting the tolling plan. Hochul can hire and fire the board members and they, in theory, will what she wants. But what if they don’t? What governing chaos might await? What confusion? You never know in funhouse mirror New York